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Many software metrics are designed to measure aspects that are believed to be related to software quality. Static software metrics, e.g., size, complexity and coupling are used in defect prediction research as well as software quality…

Despite being an old language feature, Java exception handling code is one of the least understood parts of many systems. Several studies have analyzed the characteristics of exception handling code, trying to identify common practices or…

Background: Code cloning - copying and reusing pieces of source code - is a common phenomenon in software development in practice. There have been several empirical studies on the effects of cloning, but there are contradictory results…

Proponents of software verification have argued that simpler code is easier to verify: that is, that verification tools issue fewer false positives and require less human intervention when analyzing simpler code. We empirically validate…

Build verifiability refers to the property that the build of a software system can be verified by independent third parties and it is crucial for the trustworthiness of a software system. Various efforts towards build verifiability have…

Software quality is critical in modern software engineering, especially in large and evolving codebases. This study analyzes the evolution of software quality metrics in five successive versions of the open-source Java testing framework…

Code cloning plays a very important role in open-source software engineering. The presence of clones within a project may indicate a need for refactoring, and clones between projects are even more interesting, since code migration takes…

The migration process between different third-party libraries is hard, complex and error-prone. Typically, during a library migration, developers need to find methods in the new library that are most adequate in replacing the old methods of…

JSON is an essential file and data format in do-mains that span scientific computing, web APIs or configuration management. Its popularity has motivated significant software development effort to build multiple libraries to process JSON…

As a mixed result of intensive dependency on third-party libraries, flexible mechanism to declare dependencies, and increased number of modules in a project, multiple versions of the same third-party library are directly depended in…

Neutral program variants are functionally similar to an original program, yet implement slightly different behaviors. Techniques such as approximate computing or genetic improvement share the intuition that potential for enhancements lies…

Exaggeration or context changes can render maintainability experience into prejudice. For example, JavaScript is often seen as least elegant language and hence of lowest maintainability. Such prejudice should not guide decisions without…

Unit testing is a vital part of the software development process and involves developers writing code to verify or assert production code. Furthermore, to help comprehend the test case and troubleshoot issues, developers have the option to…

Every Constraint Programming (CP) solver exposes a library of constraints for solving combinatorial problems. In order to be useful, CP solvers need to be bug-free. Therefore the testing of the solver is crucial to make developers and users…

Many internal software metrics and external quality attributes of Java programs correlate strongly with program size. This knowledge has been used pervasively in quantitative studies of software through practices such as normalization on…

The Java programming language contains many features that aid component-based software development (CBSD), such as interfaces, visibility levels, and strong support for encapsulation. However, component evolution often causes so-called…

The rapid and widespread adoption of Java has created a demand for reliable and reusable mathematical software components to support the growing number of compute-intensive applications now under development, particularly in science and…

Third-party library reuse has become common practice in contemporary software development, as it includes several benefits for developers. Library dependencies are constantly evolving, with newly added features and patches that fix bugs in…

Nowadays, modern applications are developed using components written in different programming languages. These systems introduce several advantages. However, as the number of languages increases, so does the challenges related to the…

Open-source libraries are widely used by software developers to speed up the development of products, however, they can introduce security vulnerabilities, leading to incidents like Log4Shell. With the expanding usage of open-source…